At the SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center (DCC), we frequently organize the so-called “Method Mondays,” a regular one-hour meeting series in which the team members share, practice, and test different methods. Brainstorming: The Walt Disney method. Why the methods work.

I first encountered Agile Development in 2005, when a team I supported was chosen to help pilot Scrum development methodology at Yahoo! When I left the company three years later, more than 150 teams at that company were using Scrum for developing both infrastructure and product features. In 2009, I moved on to Salesforce.com, where Agile methods (including Scrum) were implemented across their entire research and development organization.

When you’re working with a virtual team, you simply can’t let the fact that you don’t see every member of your team in person slow you down. When it comes to learning a new tool, many organizations follow a similar training pattern.

As a manager you may be willing to hire the best talent for your team no matter where they’re located, but how do you go about determining if a potential hire is, in fact, excellent? You’ll need to ask the usual questions to get at the candidate’s suitability for the work but you’ll also need to probe how the candidate will handle the remote team set-up. You may also learn about other tools they’ve used that can be of value to your existing team.

With cloud computing continuing its reach into areas once dominated by desktop applications, it’s a great time to consider how your business could benefit from online collaboration tools for producing great documents. collentine Missing the best collaboration tool out there.

It can be hard to feel connected and on the same page with employees and team members, especially when working remotely. By finding ways to relate to the people on your team, you can improve communications , build better connections and create an even stronger organization.

The steps leading up to the launch had been intense, involving multiple stakeholders, scores of different user personas, and innumerable iteration cycles spread across a multitude of design teams. Through the roller coaster ride of UX design, I’ve identified six types of UX burnout you’ll probably also encounter, along with research-backed methods to get through them. Make a point of showing your work to everyone—from team members to clients—as often as possible. MORE >>

A challenge of managing a virtual team is getting timely and thorough input and participation from team members. One way to ensure everyone has their say — or is at least given the opportunity to provide input — is to apply some principles of crowdsourcing to internal team communications. In organizations, there is a tendency for each team member to operate strictly within their department or division. MORE >>

These tips are intended primarily for in-house research teams, but they may apply to consultancies as well. For research insights to impact a specific product, the researcher must establish a deep connection with the product team. What is the context that the team is operating within? Above all, you want your product team to perceive you as a benefit rather than a hindrance. Can the team reallocate resources to keep the current launch schedule? MORE >>

Finally, analyzing social media conversations can be a powerful tool for corporate strategists to uncover market opportunities and other new types of competitive and business intelligence. New access methods can be difficult to grasp. Sit down with your marketing team to sort through the characteristics of social media influencers in your ecosystem of customers, partners, suppliers, etc., MORE >>

To the dismay of product teams desiring to ‘move fast and break things,’ their counterparts in data science and research advocate a slower, more traditional approach. Having frequently witnessed the back-and-forth between product teams and research groups, it is clear that there is no shortage of misconceptions and miscommunication between the two. There are many reasons for product teams in particular to be more concerned with avoiding false-negatives than false-positives. MORE >>